I'm sure we'll see the patch in the next kernel, everyone seems enthusiastic about it. Sometimes I encode a movie while watching another one, and this looks like a good situation where the patch would help playback of the one I'm watching.

clivesay

Post subject: RE: new patche Posted: 18.11.2010, 18:49

Joined: 2010-09-12
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A lot of talk about this in the Mepislovers forum too. I will interested to see if slh incorporates or not. I trust his judgement.

muchan

Post subject: RE: new patche Posted: 18.11.2010, 22:18

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Joined: 2010-09-11
Posts: 469

... I understood that "his judgement" is already done, that it will included if/when
it will be in mainline kernel, otherwise, never. ...

I just want to say that a normal user shouldn't care too much about this patch. Really. Don't Care. Expect nothing (so you can only be shocked by a benefit - and not falling into a depression that nothing changed).

It improves in certain areas, but only in some, and mostly in these areas a normal user don't care about. Just look at the testcase Linus provides - have you ever built a kernel? I guess most people don't do it, but to get a real benefit from this patch you need a program running on a tty (lets say a deamon, cron or something in an xterm) which spans a lot of threads - and kernel building does it. It will NOT help a single bit as soon as your program has a window (to word it really simple), at least not as long as your userland (kde, gnome, xfce, whatever) doesn't provide some sort of support for it… i don't care to much about that stuff in general - i prefer to be surprised by whatever is included in the next slh-upload

Disclaimer: "Knowledge" generated by skipping over threads and mailinglists and listing a bit to your super linuxkernel hacker…

P.S.: muchan, never mind -- you know you get the yellow card for this enormous error, next time you are out!

_________________MfG. DonKult
"I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones." ~ The Doctor

_________________MfG. DonKult
"I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones." ~ The Doctor

blackforestcoldblood

Post subject: Re: RE: new patche Posted: 19.11.2010, 22:58

Joined: 2010-11-08
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DonKult wrote:

I just want to say that a normal user shouldn't care too much about this patch.

I agree as to the "average" Linux user because the average Linux user today is not the average user of even a few years ago where "Linux" was trying to run on really underpowered systems.

But, today when I am at work, the terms are linked to a server about 12 miles away on a fiber optic the system quite often bogs down when there are thousands of people on it.

Quote:

But there's clearly enough of a CPU load when loading a new web page that if you have a load average of 50+ at the same time, you _will_ be starved for CPU in the loading process, and probably won't get all the http requests out quickly enough.

This could really be a game changer, if it produces something that the "average" terminal user perceives as reducing "lag time" this really could be a push from down under toward the higher ups to change the system from MS to Linux..

maybe, but it sounds promising.

bfcb

DonKult

Post subject: RE: Re: RE: new patche Posted: 19.11.2010, 23:27

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The problem is that most users aren't starved by CPU nowadays. They are starved by IO, by the network link, by RAM (more and more unlikely). Just enter 'uptime' in a terminal. What does "load average" says? I have a single core 1.7 GHz here that is below 1 - Linus talks about system with a load of 50 !

(i could get a 50 usage, but i just don't do that much of kernelhacking - how much do you do?)

The patch simply doesn't make the average system faster. It is just splitting the cpu time more fairly and therefore reacts "faster" on your input if the system is under heavy load, all tasks are still done in the same time as before.

_________________MfG. DonKult
"I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones." ~ The Doctor

devil

Post subject: RE: Re: RE: new patche Posted: 19.11.2010, 23:54

Joined: 2010-08-26
Posts: 491
Location: Berlin
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the userspace patch could help with e.g virtual machines (if they are started from a new terminal, putting them in separate cgroups)
and would X be not in its own cgroup also?

greetz
devil

DonKult

Post subject: RE: Re: RE: new patche Posted: 24.11.2010, 11:59

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Sure, thats the whole point that a process on a tty is not in the same group as an X process…
Its just that multiple X processes like my browser, my videoplayer and my audioplayer are all in the same cgroup as long as noone does the re-cgrouping. If i would start all of them from a terminal on the other hand…